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I was talking with my illustration agent the other day and she asked what I thought was a really weird question. Her client apparently was curious to know if I were capable of illustrating more than one character in a scene. She asked if I had some other work that maybe she hadn’t seen yet.

I was a little flabbergasted by the question… of COURSE I can! What do you mean?

So I took a look back at the past 3 years of illustrating and was pretty disturbed by what I discovered.

Essentially every single illustration I’ve done featuring a “person” (human or otherwise) is only a single character in the scene. Observe:

But here’s the really unsettling thing.Every single illustration I’ve done featuring two-or-more people, someone is either off the page, is half-a-body or has his head cropped out of the shot.

I’m not sure what this means, but it must mean something. I know I’m neurotic, but discovering this has me worried I might be certifiably nuts.

Comments

Hi Troy, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, I think every artist has visual elements that they rely on, for example, when I do digital collage work I noticed I have a tendency to have some sort of hand in the image. I think there’s something about hands that are expressive so I tend to use them a lot as a way of conveying emotion without using a face. The thing is, when I realized it, it helped me to improve my art, seeing trends like this helped me to not only identify some of the visual cues that I use for the ‘heavy lifting’ of the idea but also helped me to see some boxes that I could start thinking outside of (creatively speaking). Now that you realized your tendency to use one person in an illustration, rise to the challenge, and use some of the elements you often don’t work with as parameters for making something new! In my experience these discoveries aren’t an indication of something wrong at all, often times I’ve found that they are how I grow the most as an artist.